When the surgery was complete, the doctor stepped away and examined his handwork, cocking his head. He wiped his knife on his apron and then reached into a pocket and pulled out a tiny vial of something brilliantly golden and glowing. It lit the doctor’s face from below, bright as a candle. “There we are. Just a drop to keep the infection away and make sure the new eye takes,” he murmured, and delicately tilted the vial so that a single golden drop fell onto the baron’s face.
“What should we do with him?” the man in the tall hat said, cocking his head toward the bound boy, whose now-empty eye socket was spilling a river of blood over the table and onto the straw below. “’E’s bleeding something fierce.”
The doctor was distracted, with all his attention on the baron. “Oh,” he said. “Cotton in the wound to stop him bleeding.” He tutted and gave the boy a quick glance. “Not sure this one is going to survive, bless him. We’ll keep him here for a few hours, see if he recovers. If he dies, send him behind the poorhouse. You know what to do, Jones. It’s the Roman fever if anyone asks.” He turned back toward the baron, leaning in close to appreciate his own work, the hundreds of tiny veins he had placed and sealed to give the man the new eye he was paying for. “Some of my best work, I think, Jones.”
“And some of your fastest too,” the man in the tall hat replied. “Done in half the time of some of your other work.”
“Well, I did try,” the doctor said. His hair was slick with effort. He pulled off his magnifying lens and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a gloved hand, and then Dr. Beecham turned to the bleachers of the surgical theater and looked directly at where Hazel was standing. “After all, we had an audience today.”
34
BEFORE HAZEL COULD MOVE, THE MAN in the tall hat had his rough hand around her elbow. He had advanced like a hound in the shadows, so quickly and silently that he was pulling Hazel forward, out toward the stage of the surgical theater by the time she cried out.
“Miss Sinnett,” Dr. Beecham said, wiping the blood from his gloves. “Welcome. I confess, I am actually delighted you thought to witness my surgery this morning. I always find my hands steadier when I’m performing for someone. How dull to make art in an empty room, a symphony gone unheard. And you’re one of the few who I believe may actually appreciate the gravity of what I do here. The rest of them”—he gestured to the sleeping baron, whose eye was now padded with cotton—“are perfectly content just to get what they want. They pay their fee, and the deed is done. No curiosity. No interest in science beyond their own silly little purposes. It’s tragic, in its own way, how small their lives are. How little they care for the world outside their own bodies. But you. You, Hazel Sinnett, you understand. The examination was this morning, wasn’t it? I suppose this means you forfeit our little wager. No matter really, no matter at all. I’m so much happier that you’re here.
“You understand how miraculous it really is, to take a living part from one man and transpose it into another, to restore the gift of sight via, well, a gift on the part of our generous donor. It took me years to be able to do eyes. Fingers, easy. No time at all. Full limbs, a natural progression from there. Now, the heart I haven’t quite mastered. Still working on the transposition of a heart. But I’m optimistic yet. The heart will be next for me.”
Hazel sputtered, struggling against the viselike grip of the man in the tall hat. All the questions she wanted to ask bubbled up in her chest at once, and the one that escaped her lips was, “What are you doing?”
Beecham stopped wiping his gloves. “What am I doing? My dear, I thought that was obvious?”
Hazel jerked her elbow away from the man in the tall hat, and Beecham raised his hand, indicating that his lackey could stand down. “You’re—you’re kidnapping people. You’re taking poor people, and then operating on them. Using your ethereum, and taking things from them. Limbs, organs, eyes.”
“‘Taking’ is such a crude way of putting it,” Beecham said, wincing slightly. “You’ve lived a very sheltered life, Miss Sinnett, I doubt you know the terrible nature of the way things happen in Edinburgh’s Old Town among the truly poor and destitute. These people are thieves and criminals. They lose their limbs and lives in meaningless, terrible ways every single day. This thief here could have died of hunger or consumption, or in a brawl or a thousand other ways. A knife in a pub fight could have taken his eye tomorrow, and no one would care. I simply give order to the chaos. I give meaning to their lives.”